Wood SUP

I started building three wood stand up paddleboards (SUPs) last week. They are all the rage on the great lakes, slow rivers and lakes here in the eastern states and beyond. I tried one out and it was alot of fun, started looking at them and decided the only way for me to go was with wood. I dragged down a buddy to build one with me.

The build process so far is basically building an airplane wing. It is a long rockered spar with 16 frames that shape the width of the board. The skeleton gets planked with cedar then glassed. Pretty simple, I made a jig to hold the rocker that takes up most of my garage.

Replies to This Discussion

Sounds cool. It has become all the rage as you mentioned, up in Traverse and other resort areas there are lots of places to rent them and you see them being hauled on rooftops quite often around here and "up north" as we say. Good luck, can't wait to see what you come up with.

Thanks Jason. Your drifter Pram is looking really nice BTW. Very nice work, you have an eye for detail. do us a favor and keep posting pictures. I will likely be in MI this fall for grouse season and some holy water streamer fishing. I'll have my drift pram with me too.

As you can imagine SUP's have exploded her in Central Oregon as well. Thought about getting into it but can't find the time. Thanx for posting the link, I like there stuff. I saw a pic recently of a guy who built a sailboat or something with internals similar to a SUP but he covered the top with Lexan so you could see all the internal framing, looked killer. I thought it would be a neat idea on a SUP. Good luck, looking forward to the pics.

Chesapeake light craft has some pretty cool plans as well. They also wet out some Hawaiian style print fabric and put it in under the fiberglass in some areas, which I think gives them a fun finished look. Check it out for some ideas.... Post pics of your progress, I'm interested and was thinking about building one of these down the road as well.

I am also building this SUP. Cut out the ribs and spine and found some discrepancy in the blueprint measurements. The center ribs are not as wide as the spine so some manual fine tuning is necessary. The end ribs match exactly. Since this is a new design there are a few bugs. If I build another one, I would modify the spine curve to match the ribs.